Between 1953 and 1963, Gino Filippetto also served as Secretary-General of the Unione Internazionale degli Istituti di Archeologia, Storia e Storia dell’Arte, the coordinating body for the foreign archaeological, historical, and art-historical institutes based in Rome (Filippetto 1979/1980: 17).
He had studied with Attilio Simioni (1882–1950) at the Istituto Commerciale in Padua and worked at the publisher Ulrico Hoepli in Milan before he joined the Swedish Institute. So far, there is no evidence that Filippetto was himself involved in scholarly work, nor was he a prolific author. He did, however, write a brief historical account of the Unione (Filippetto 1979/1980).
The archaeologist Carlo Anti (1889–1961), former president of the University of Padua (1932–1943), visited Filippetto in his library in the spring of 1946 and described him as ‘a somewhat surprising figure, a result you wouldn’t expect from a family from Padua. Quick-witted, charming, and confident in his abilities’ (‘una figura … alquanto inattesa, un frutto che uno non crederebbe possibile da un ceppo patavino. Svelto, simpatico, sicuro del fatto suo’) (Losacco 2022: 150). According to Anti, Filippetto was married to a Swedish woman.
Filippetto had an interest in polar explorations and gathered a small collection of books on the subject, most of them published in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. This collection entered the library of the Norwegian Institute in Rome around 2000.
Fondo Gino Filippetto: 66 volumes and 2 boxes of offprints.
Bibliography
Selected works
Filippetto, Gino. 1979/1980. “Cenni storici.” Annuario Unione Internazionale degli Istituti di Archeologia 21: 12–18.
Secondary literature
Losacco, Margherita. ‘Biblioteche di classicisti padovani nel Novecento’. In Libertas: tra religione, politica e saperi, edited by Andrea Caracausi, Paola Molino, and Dennj Solera, 137–50. Padova: Padova University Press, 2022.